Ep. 72 Mind the gap or embrace the gain?

Hello, I'm Mary Wanlis welcoming you to podcast number 72 in our series for the summer of 2025. I want to tell you the story of a rider I met for the first time relatively recently and she was riding a borrowed horse in a clinic hosted by a colleague of mine who had taught her one time in a clinic in her home state. The story was that she and her husband had been riding on holiday in fabulous scenery and they lived as well in a place of fabulous scenery and had been so inspired that they came home, bought themselves two horses, turned their lives upside down and took to riding. My colleague who was running the clinic that I was teaching in and had taught her once before, told me partway through the three day clinic that on her first lesson she was apparently quite resistant to the ride with your mind way of being coached and noticing and thinking. Interestingly, though her husband found himself able to catch up to the balance point. He discovered how to control the tempo, not get run away with and was so relieved he burst into tears. So the rider I'm talking about was out of her depth rider riding a fairly big horse and having to do rising trot in the clinic that she came to ride with me and she was very low tone and very what I would call down heavy, tending to be in an armchair seat, almost like she would treat the horse like a mobile armchair. And I didn't expect her to be the most committed rider, although it is true that I meet trail riders who really are committed, they're not ambitious, but they really want to know they're doing it right by their horses and being as ethical as they can be by being in a good balance point and having good basic skills while they're trail riding. And I always hope I can entice them to get interested in a little more than that, but I'm happy to help them achieve that aim. So my rider did indeed come across as low on commitment. She sighed a lot, she needed a lot of reminders and gave me the impression that it was all too much and too difficult and she'd give up quickly and collapse. And she did have low tone, the kind of low tone that makes riding really, really demanding. And I was doing exercises with her to try and get her stronger and firmer in her body and more able to support her body weight. And really her horse and any horse needed her to support her body weight better. And it wasn't just that she was going with the difficulty of was also that she was kind of wincing about it. And I discovered partway through the clinic as well, that since her first clinic with my colleague, she'd taken to listening to these podcasts and she'd listened to them all twice, which takes some doing. So she'd really learnt the language and she understood the concepts. Now, I meet many people who've heard the conventional language over and over again and it hasn't really done it for them. And they could recite the catechism of grow tall, stick your chest out, push your heels down, whatever, but they don't really do it or understand it. When I meet people who recite my catechism, as it were, without doing it, they understand the words, but they haven't got it in their body. It distresses me because we as coaches really want people to get it in their body. And just knowing the words is not helpful. And it was really not helpful for this rider because it meant she had an idea of what should be happening in some kind of theory that wasn't happening and was clearly going to demand a huge amount from her to make it happen. And she was effectively finding herself living in the gap rather than the gain. And you might have heard me talk of this before, the gap between what she thought should be happening and the words she'd heard and the riders she'd seen and falling short all the time rather than living in the gain. And even if things are a struggle and a bit slow, being able to say to herself, this is better than it was last week and last month and last year. And when I look back and I see the big overview, I can see how much I've learned, how much I've gained, how much I've improved. Now, you possibly have heard the name Carl Jung. He broke away from Sigmund Freud in the very early days of psychoanalysis and created a much more friendly version. And one of the things that he's famous for saying is, you cannot choose not to suffer, but you can choose your suffering. And really, this woman was caught between two different kinds of suffering. One was knowing the words, hearing the concepts, finding it all really difficult. Falling short, living in the gap rather than the gain, and effectively making herself miserable. The alternative form of pain was finding the power she needed in her thighs as they were weight bearing her kneel, her hung in a harness, her bear down, which was a big demand on a body that was naturally low tone. So there was a physical demanding version of suffering. And I was trying to help her do this and have her go in short bursts because I knew she couldn't keep it up for very long. But I knew there was potentially some satisfaction in that or the other form of suffering, which wasn't going to have much satisfaction. And in doing this, I fairly regularly said to know, you don't have to do this. This might not be for you. It might take more commitment, more concentration and muscle power that you want to put into it. You could go away and decide this is not for you if you want to. And by the end of three days she was saying, I'm going to give this my best shot as I go away, I get it really makes a difference to me and my horse. And I was encouraging her to do that, and internally a little bit skeptical about whether she would. Now it turns out that my colleague, when she next went back to that state to do a clinic, didn't teach her that she watched rather than rowed, but sent a message to my colleague afterwards about how much she'd learned from watching. So maybe she's up for it, maybe she isn't, the jury's out. And maybe she's going to be more of an armchair expert and hopefully a benign, helpful armchair expert, and one armed with a reasonable eye and some viable consequences concepts which I think most armchair experts in the horse world aren't. Here's a very different scenario with a much more experienced rider who's rather tall and elegant. She has a rather tall, elegant horse who hasn't been that easy, but they can go along looking reasonably okay. The horse fairly round, trucking along, every now and again having a bit of a meltdown, but mostly all right. But as I looked at this, I was a little bit concerned about what was going on in the realm of contact. And I had her stop and I held the reins near the bit as if I was the horse and said to her, okay, show me what a normal contact would be. And I was not surprised to find that that normal contact was, was really strong. So the horse could look like she was in a viable outline, but it was a very held in place by the hand outline, which on occasion the horse kind of rebelled at. So we did an exercise. I had her just hold the reins in one hand in a loop and join hands with me with her other hand. And to join hands in a way that was just us curling our fingers around each other. So if you were to take your two hands, curl your fingers and then interlock your curled fingers, that's the way that we held hands. And I stood near the horse's shoulder, we held hands like that, and I leant back saying, I'm the horse, and here we are with a pretty strong contact and I'm just going to keep doing this unless you find a way out of this predicament. So what are you going to do? And she tried pulling harder and I just pulled back harder and she tried jiggling her hand around and we still kept pulling and she tried jiggling her arm around and we still kept pulling. I told her she must not uncurl her fingers from mine because that could have ended badly for me, but she tried everything else she could think of and then pretty much, I give up. So I had to show her the way out of this predicament. And what I told her to do was to take her hand and move it quickly 3 or 4 inches forward towards me along the line of our arms, and by doing that, drop me and force me to have to take a step, get my feet underneath my body and take responsibility for myself, because I couldn't counterbalance against her anymore. So we had to do this a number of times to get it right. So it doesn't work so well if the rider gives the hand forwards, but towards the horse's eyes, as it were, rather than towards what would be the bit, or in the case of me leaning on the end of her hand directly towards me. The hand has to move rather quickly because if it's slow, I, as the horse, can adapt to it. And we practised this a number of times and she got to where she could give her hand forward relatively quickly, caused me to have to take a step, organise myself, make it so I was in my own balance. But then she put her hand back in place and immediately pull again. So I then had to show her how to give her hand forward quickly and put it back in place really slowly so that it wasn't a pull. And the net result was, there was her, there was me, our fingers were interlocking, but neither of us were pulling. Many, many riders bring their hand back into a pull after doing this exercise, and I've been known to spend a long time with a rider doing this before they walked on. And I suspect that this rider is one of the many riders who's ridden on what I call permanent pull, but really not realised that that was what was happening. So in walk with the rein in each hand. Now she got to practice with her inside hand, giving it forward quickly along the line of the rein towards the bit ring, counting the one, two of each front leg, stepping and putting the hand back in place slowly and very carefully so she didn't get caught up in pulling again. And Fairly soon the horse would go, we have this deal where we pull, remember? And she'd give her hand away, bring it back into place really slowly, doing her utmost not to pull. And a few strides later the horse would go, you know, we have this deal where we pull. And she'd have to repeat. And we got that working well before we got as far as doing it in trot. Giving your hand forward in trot, the 1, 2 is quicker, the put it back into place without pulling is trickier. And the rider's got to be really together in their body because essentially the rider's saying to the horse, I will use my thigh and my bear down to hold the shape of your back, to hold your back up, but I will not use my hand to hold your head up. And gradually this began to work. And as the horse got lighter in hand and in a more viable carriage and the rider on the horse weren't so involved in the counterbalance, my rider started saying, but my thighs are hurting so much, my thighs are really hurting. And now my abs are hurting too. Do I really have to ride with my thighs and my abs hurting like this? And my response was, well, yes, you do. And how come you never complained about the pull and the pain in your arm muscles? Now, she really didn't have an answer to that and I didn't push her really hard on it, but she didn't have an answer. Now, for me as a rider, whenever my arms started hurting, I was a very unhappy camper. I'm a lot smaller than her. I would start to feel I was being towed around. She could somehow keep her body lined up fairly well and take the stress in her arms and just keep going. On the whole, guys are more adept than that than women. And it can be quite hard as a coach to get a guy to come out of that way of using their strength wrongly and to find the right way for their thigh, their bear down, their overall organisation to be what uses strength in the right way. And my rider had really good backup from her normal coach in her area, and as I went back some months later, had kept this really well and done a really good job and was a much happier rider, not having a mighty pull on her arm and hand and was beginning to gain some thigh muscles, gain some bear down muscles and be much less upset by what it takes to ride really well. And it really wasn't that she had been riding in the gap rather than the gain, because she had normalised that strong contact. Normalized, I think, is a new word for kind of made it okay, made it the new norm. She wasn't seeing that or feeling that as something that shouldn't be happening. So she was kind of delusional in her relative state of happiness, but much, much more okay in her newfound skill. Here's the story. Another rider who lives sometimes in the gap and sometimes in the gain. She's a young professional. She's ridden a lot of remedial horses, and she has good skills. And she's made some terrific changes to those remedial horses and received quite some accolades for doing it and reached a stage in her career where her clients are buying more expensive horses. She's riding more expensive and more trained horses. She finds herself thinking, oh, I think this horse should be doing better than it is. Oh, maybe this is reflecting on me. Maybe I'm not as good as I thought I was. This isn't going well. It should be brilliant by now. And suddenly there she is, living in the gap and feeling undermined. You could say that she's haunted by how she thinks it should be on this more trained and more expensive horse. And I really worked with her to try and have her understand that these horses could just be a more expensive version of a remedial horse, and they needed the same kind of skills. I can remember, for instance, owning two horses where the change in my body that get my older and more trained horse into piaf was just about enough to get the younger horse to stop towing me around the school and to take me seriously and for me to be a viable leader of the dance. So she had to bring the same skills to bear in a somewhat different way. And actually, when she got demoralized, she tended to go into a bit of a slump and to lose tone so she could be a more toned, more up for it, more energetic rider when things were going well, and a rather despairing rider when things weren't doing well. And I found myself working with her at halt, doing what I call attack mode, giving her a resistance just below her collarbone, going, resist my push. And then resisting her on the front of each shoulder, going, resist my push, resisting on the side of her waist, resisting low down on her back, then higher up and higher up and higher up till I could do a resistance between her shoulder blade and speeding up these resistances in a way that made her really have to firm up her tone. And then she found herself realizing, oh, that's what happens, isn't it? When I get a little down on myself, I lose tone. Or if I'm riding a horse that doesn't have much tone. I get the strength sucked out of me as I get more wobbly, rather than keeping my strength and my tone and getting that horse to match me. That's an exercise I normally do with more novice riders. Like the first rider I told you about, where I wanted to get her rather soggy body to support itself much better. And I'd never thought of doing it with a more skilled rider, but it was so appropriate for this occasion. And I think it really helped her understand that she should treat the more trained horses just like she treated the remedial horses and bring her skills to bear in the same kind of way. So here I've told you about three different riders. The one who tended to just be and low tone and give up really easily. The one who tended to go, right, this is going to happen. I'm going to make it happen. I don't care what it takes. If I have to pull, I have to pull. We're going to make it look right. And the one who was a little unstable in the middle, she could do really good skills on the remedial horses, but needed to really realise how she needed to bring those skills together and stay in the gain rather than the gap on the more advanced horses. So I wonder where you lie in that kind of spectrum. And as you have fun, I hope, with your horses this week and enjoy riding, notice how much you can be in the game, be in the moment, be noticing, be getting more refined in the feedback that you pick up from your horse and the signals that you give to him. Have a great time. I'll be back soon.